Whenever many people are focused on different aspects of an interconnected system, to maintain order, one needs processes and policies. In Information Technology (IT) management, an Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is an accepted group of best practices for information services management. The IT Service management disciplines include Change management, Incident and Problem Management, and Asset Management.
Change Management is the discipline of introducing changes to an IT environment (e.g., an organization's enterprise) in a planned and controlled manner. This involves human workflows for initiating, reviewing, approving and authorizing the changes, scheduling them, notifying effected parties, enacting the changes and keeping record of the changes. It also involves periodically auditing the IT environment to make sure that the records indeed reflect reality.
Today, most automation to help and coordinate IT work in Change Management is around the workflows that deal with change orders in the text form that define changes. Humans manually perform activities associated with change orders such as analysis, design, planning, business decision making, scheduling and negotiation. Further, change orders are managed using different IT managements tools that refer to information about the IT environment which might not be up to date or even available.